PhotoSketch – Fake or Not?

Many moons ago, yes back in the day when I was a Scitex Imagery One operator, we had an account where we needed to montage scenes together of people dressed in historical outfits. It was pretty cool, but pretty tough going as the image composition tools then were not a touch on the power of Photoshop and other image tools today. I seem to remember the books being called ‘I Was There’ or something along those lines. Anyway these comps took ages for what today would probably take a couple of hours and cost a fraction of the cost – especially if you had all the cut-outs offshored.

Anyway today I was watching a video on Vimeo where Ping Tan, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, participated in a written a journal of PhotoSketch. Now I know there is some pretty awesome technology out there and we saw some of that reach us in Photoshop CS4 with the addition of the Content-Aware Scale (if you haven’t used it then just watch any video on youtube on the subject, but I like this example here). But is this actually possible? And if they have done this and it’s not just one of those projects you need to do at University and write a paper on, (although the source code is also available to download) it would be pretty awesome, albeit putting plenty of people out of work. So I have my suspicions – even if it was possible and available, would the resulting images look like an amateur has put them together? I guess we will find out in the not too distant future. So for now, take a look yourself and let us have your comments on it.